It’s natural to think that all city-dwellers have great broadband options. But when you look closer you find out it’s often not really so. For various reasons there are sizable pockets of urban folks with gaping broadband needs.

Sometimes the broadband gap is just partial. I was just talking to a guy yesterday from Connecticut who lives in a neighborhood that largely commutes to New York City for work. These are rich neighborhoods of investment bankers, stockbrokers and other white collar households. They have cable modem service from Comcast and can get home broadband, but he tells me that cell phone coverage is largely non-existent. He can’t even use his cellphone outside of his house. There is a lot of talk about broadband migrating to wireless, but 5G broadband isn’t going to benefit people that can’t even get low-bandwidth cellular voice service.

I also have a good friend who lives in a multi-million dollar home in Potomac, Maryland – the wealthiest town in one of the wealthiest counties in the country. He has no landline broadband – no cable company, no Verizon FiOS, and not even any usable DSL. His part of the town has winding roads and sprawling lots and was built over time. I’m sure that it never met the cable company’s franchise density requirement of at least 15 or 20 homes per street mile of fiber – so it never got built. I am sure that most of the city has broadband, but even within the richest communities there are homes without.

You often see this problem just outside of city boundaries. Cities generally have franchise agreements that require the cable company to serve everybody, or almost everybody. But since counties rarely have these agreements the cable and phone companies are free to pick and choose who to serve outside of town. You will see some neighborhoods outside of a city with a cable company network while another similar neighborhood nearby goes without. It’s easy to find these pockets by looking for satellite TV dishes. The difference between the two neighborhoods is often due to nothing more to the whim of the telco and cable companies at the time of original construction.

The fault for not having broadband can’t always be laid on the cable company. Apartment owners and real estate developers for new neighborhoods are often at fault. For example there are many apartments around where the apartment owner made a deal years ago with a satellite TV providers to provide bulk cable TV service on a revenue sharing basis. In electing satellite TV the apartment owner excluded the cable company and today has no broadband.

Real estate developers often make the same bad choices. For instance some of hoped to provide broadband themselves but it never came to fruition. I’ve even seen some developments that just waited too long to invite in the cable company or telco and the service providers declined to build after the streets were paved. The National Broadband Map is a great resource for understanding local broadband coverage. In my own area there are two neighborhoods on the map that show no broadband. When I first saw the map I assumed these were parks, but there are homes in both of these areas. I don’t know why these areas are sitting without broadband, but it’s as likely to be a developer issue as a cable company issue.

There have also been several articles written recently that accuse the large cable companies and telcos of economic redlining. These companies may use some of the above excuses for not building to the poorer parts of an urban area, but overlaying broadband coverage and incomes often paints a startling picture. Since deciding where a cable company expands is often at the discretion of local and regional staff it’s not hard to imagine bias entering the process.

I’ve seen estimates that between 6 and 8 million urban people don’t have broadband available. These have to be a mixture of the above situations – the neighborhoods are outside of a franchise area, or the developers or apartments owners didn’t allow ISPs in, or the ISPs are engaging in economic redlining. But for whatever the reasons this is a lot of people, especially when added to the 14 million rural citizens without broadband.

I spend a lot of my time working on the rural broadband gap, but I don’t see much concentrated effort looking at the urban gap. That’s probably because this gap is one where it’s one subdivision, one apartment building or one street at a time with surrounding households having broadband. It’s hard to cobble together a constituency of these folks and even harder to find an economic solution to fix the problem.